


boyfriend material

by reconvenings



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Capitalism, Clothed Sex, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Eddie used to run a fashion blog, Frottage, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Post-Canon, Repression, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Suit Porn, canon compliant in that he still has bad taste
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:14:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27633250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconvenings/pseuds/reconvenings
Summary: Someone put Richie on a list titled “Greatest Gay Icons of 2016,” right under the Babadook. Eddie texted him,That’s not fair. How’d you get two spots.Or, Eddie owns more than one pair of Gucci loafers. Richie hires a stylist. It turns out that 2017 is Eddie’s year of Realizing Things.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 68
Kudos: 460





	boyfriend material

At some point between the spring rolls and the second-most cursed set of fortune cookies since _Freaky Friday_ , Eddie leaned over the table and told Beverly Marsh that he was a fan of her work.

“I thought your collection last spring was genius,” he said, while Ben and Richie tried to see who could pick peanuts up with their chopsticks the fastest.

“Oh,” said Bev, surprised. “Do you -”

“Yeah, I’m a little bit of an enthusiast,” Eddie said. “I try to catch a few shows every season.” He’d had tickets to Rogan + Marsh shows twice before but hadn’t ever used them. A medical emergency or a last-minute client meeting, most likely. He couldn’t really remember and it brought up a quick speed bump of nausea. He pressed a hand to the back of his neck and sat back down. “Although I really only follow menswear,” he added.

“Oh!” said Bev, “That’s so great! And menswear is what I love the most, you know.”

Sometime after that, the fortune cookies started moving, and they had to fight an evil clown, and Eddie basically died, and his horsebit loafers got covered in sewage. That last one was especially unfortunate because the shoes had been his first big high fashion purchase for himself, after his FY2005 bonus came in. Looking back, they were definitely overpriced, a very amateurish selection that turned more on status symbol than taste, but it was true that he could have done worse. They were good, lasting shoes and they’d served him well, put a bounce in his step whenever he thought he might need to make a particularly good impression. He’d worn them the last two times he’d gotten promoted, and at his and Myra’s wedding reception, too. They were the shoes you wore to say _yes, everything is going great_. 

But Eddie’s prized Gucci loafers ended up soaked through with human excrement and the physical manifestation of fear, collective trauma, or midlife crises, depending on whatever metaphorical tear Bill happened to be on when you asked. Or the space alien debris of the destroyer of worlds, if for some godforsaken reason you decided to ask Mike. The shoes were ruined and Eddie almost died and after he almost died he went and got divorced, which was a process that involved paying a lawyer $300 an hour to kill you very, very slowly. By that point, fanboying over a mid-range luxury designer was down to at least number fourteen on Eddie’s list of pressing concerns, and it had lost most of its lustre now that he remembered that the designer had once strong-armed him into helping her bleach her hair and he had messed it up so badly that she cried and punched him in the throat, and so then they’d made Stan — who only had a learner’s permit at the time — drive them to the next town over to buy a platinum blonde wig that she wore for two weeks straight before deciding to just shave it all off.

Anyways, the point here is that Eddie had brought it up. So in the end, he had no one to blame but himself.

*

Someone put Richie on a list titled “Greatest Gay Icons of 2016,” right under the Babadook. Eddie texted him, _That’s not fair. How’d you get two spots_.

“Hi Eddie,” he heard Bev call out from Richie’s living room. She was staying with him because they had three friends with big fuck-off houses, but she was only completely platonic with one of them, and her lawyers said she couldn’t give Tom a single whiff of ammo. They hadn’t wanted her to stay with Richie either, until he’d come out by tweeting a notes app screenshot that said “yes i am gay - love is luv, richie” followed by a string of incomprehensible emojis that several people spent multiple days attempting to decipher. Eddie himself stared at the little icon of the man in the tall Russian hat next to the leafy orange carrot for at least ninety minutes, wondering if it meant that Richie had a secret foreign boyfriend with a pointy dick, until Bill had asked about the emojis point-blank in the group chat and Richie had admitted he’d just slid his finger around and added them randomly “for visual interest.”

“I know you meant it in a rude way,” said Richie, “But I could definitely pull off the top hat.” That was unlikely. Richie didn’t even brush his hair on a daily basis; letting him wear a top hat was akin to holding an open casting call for a scalp infection.

Richie right now was wearing a faded orange t-shirt with a stretched-out collar. Probably his head was too big for it and so it was pulling at the seams when he put it on. He was in the kitchen making caipirinhas for himself and Bev (at 1PM because they didn’t have real jobs) and had propped his phone up against the backsplash. Eddie could see the dark bleeding rings of his pit stains when he reached into the cupboard for the sugar. 

“I can’t believe it’s been three decades and you still don’t wear deodorant.”

Richie had nice deltoids, all things considered, Eddie thought idly. There was no way he was someone who went to the gym, but maybe he had to lift microphone stands up on a regular basis? Eddie imagined that could be something analogous to a lateral lift. As long as you were leading with your legs. Richie on stage carrying around heavy audio equipment, unloading crew vans because it calmed him down before a show. He was a naturally big guy, you know, probably couldn’t hurt to lend a hand.

“Been working up a sweat fucking your mom,” Richie was saying, his voice loud and shaggy through Eddie’s earbuds. Yeah, of course. That was the setup; this was the punchline.

“Richie, come over here,” Bev called from the other room. Richie twisted around, his arms dropping and the cloud-shaped stains underneath them folding back down out of sight.

“Hang on, Eds, we’re going on a little trip,” he said, and the image on Eddie’s phone screen shuffled and bobbed as Richie picked it up and walked into the living area. Eddie with a very macro-lensed view of the pinched corner of Richie’s eye.

“Here, try this on,” Bev said when the image came to a brief standstill, her voice tinny with minor distance.

“Switch,” said Richie, and then the video feed changed again to Richie’s ceiling fan, rotating in lazy, rounded loops. About a third of the screen was blacked out where Bev’s thumb must have been masking part of the camera.

“What is this?” Richie asked.

“Just try it on. It’s one of, like, three things I have that might fit you.”

“Here? I’m not gonna — ” Richie cut off awkwardly. The ceiling fan was still going. It chopped through the air in measured strokes.

After a moment, Eddie heard Bev scoff and say, “I was literally going to keep holding the phone like this. Dunno why you have to be so _precious_ about it. It’s not like he’d even -”

“Okay, I’m going upstairs to change!” Richie announced, just as Bev tipped the phone up so that, finally, Eddie could see her face. He heard what sounded like Richie shuffling away in the background.

“Look at this, Eddie,” Bev said brightly, “They finally let my assistant back into the house so he’s shipping over some of my things. I’m going to send you some stuff, could you text me your measurements?” She tilted the camera down perpendicularly, scanning over a large cardboard box filled with dry cleaning bags. “I found your blog, by the way,” she said, so offhandedly that it was clear she had been planning it.

“My — what??” Eddie spluttered.

“Your fashion blog,” Bev said, “Sad it hasn’t updated since before Derry, though.” She mocked up a wide-eyed pout. The smugness still shone through.

Eddie gaped at her.

“So, all the Rogan + Marsh product is still in escrow, but I own some other pieces you might like.” She lifted the end of one of the bags from the box and draped it over one of its sides. “I can’t believe you called McQueen ‘an affront to wallpaper designers everywhere.’ You couldn’t even let it up in memoriam?” she said as she unzipped the bag with one hand.

“That was before he passed!” Eddie yelled, throwing his free hand up, before he remembered he was on a FaceTime call in the middle of Battery Park. Then he also remembered it was his lunch break and he was still in-character as a Wall Street asshole, so he was probably expected to scream here anyway.

He pulled at the root of his tie and said in a marginally lower voice, “How the hell did you find that thing? It doesn’t even have my name on it?”

“Well I was only about 85% sure, but thank you for confirming it.” Bev said, flipping the camera onto her face again. She grinned at him with her big, orderly teeth. The video quality was still shit but Eddie was pretty sure he could see the glint of a filled-in cavity from one of her back molars. “Consider this: I’m unemployed, obsessed with you, and friends with Mike.”

“You’re not obsessed with me.”

Ben, maybe, narrative-wise, or Richie, who was excessively interesting and living with her. Stan, even, who was fussy and yet had a good marriage that, on balance, Eddie might actually be a little obsessed with.

“Oh I’m obsessed with all of you. Your lives are _fascinating_. Yesterday, Richie told me that he used to sell whippets in college.”

“That can’t have been economical,” Eddie said, remembering the entire month Richie had bragged about his dealer, one of the popular seniors in school, who was giving him a _discount_ because he thought Richie was _cool_ , and taunted Eddie by blowing the smoke in his face when he picked him up from academic decathlon, which Eddie hated and was only barely mediocre at but was one of the only extracurriculars he could do without Sonia demanding to read his vitals. This had gone on until Bev had visited for Thanksgiving break and laughed at Richie in the face after he passed her a hit from the pipe he’d bought at the souvenir store. “It’s oregano, you dipshit,” she’d said, turning the bowl over in her palm and bringing it to rest right under his nostrils. Eddie and Stan, who were there too, nearly pissed themselves laughing. They called him the Noid for at least another month after that.

“Yeah, I think he was operating at a deficit.”

Eddie hummed in assent. He wondered if Bev remembered the oregano. 

He said, “I guess it makes sense that Mike knew about it,” thinking about Mike alone in Derry, tacking up cork boards full of the Losers’ life accoutrement. There was that familiar pang of unmet apology again, for all the years that Mike had tended, in quiet custodianship, to the knowledge of their lives, together and later apart. 

“You did a shit job of anonymizing,” Bev remarked, “Give my regards to Fred and Mary. Are they still married?”

“Don’t you dare tell him,” Eddie hissed.

“Of course not, honey,” she said sweetly, which was a bad sign.

Bev’s eyeline shifted then, her brow raising a touch above the lens. She let out a low whistle. “Mmm, you clean up nice, Tozier,” she said.

“What-” said Eddie. The video flipped and then Eddie was holding an image of Richie in a thin knit sweater. Teal, tan, and blue, zigzagging across his torso. It settled fitted and snug on his cargo ship frame, stretching lyrically over his chest when he rubbed awkwardly at his crossed arms. Richie wasn’t wearing an undershirt where the low v-neck dipped past bare skin and there were curling strands of dark hair poking out.

“It’s soft,” he said, shrugging, “I thought it would be itchy.”

“It’s Missoni,” Bev said, louder and so much closer to the mic that Eddie startled, “They use these special knitting machines and it makes the knit really close together.”

“Well,” said Richie, tugging at the hem. That pulled the sweater down further, and now Eddie could really see the hair on his chest. “It’s nice. Probably way nicer than anything I own.”

“I’ll get you more nice things!” exclaimed Bev. “If you want them! Nice things for everyone, right Eddie?”

Richie looked up, as if he’d just realized Eddie was there, taking up ambient, virtual space in his living room. He let go of the sweater. It sprung back up. Eddie heard a _boing-oing-oing_ sound go off in his head. There it was again — the spending too much time talking to Richie thing. The man walked around like an out-of-work foley artist from the ‘40s.

“Right,” Eddie said in response to Bev. To Richie, he said, “It does look good on you. Soft.”

“Yeah, you think so?” Richie said, turning his head towards the camera, like it helped him hear Eddie better. That velvety, pleased expression he got on his face that Eddie knew he ought to stop aiming for, because it was so much more selfish to, now that he knew what it meant.

Eddie blushed, which was, on one hand, okay that time, because Richie couldn’t see him. On the other, it was worse, because Bev could.

“Richie,” she said conversationally, which, he supposed as he heard it, was the death knell. Beverly Marsh, a person of motives — typically sinister ones — never did anything conversationally. “Have you ever considered hiring a stylist?”

*

From 2007 to 2014, Eddie had been the sole owner and operator of a Blogspot domain titled “The Couture Analyst.” Those were the years when the big fashion trades were rather slim on their menswear coverage, so he’d amassed a respectable follower base writing about Valentino, Versace, Vuitton — all the big names that hoarded value in a logo clasp.

It started when he bought Myra a Coach purse their first Christmas together, off the throwaway advice of one of his more odious managers at Goldman, who nonetheless appeared to be staunchly attentive to his second wife and seemed to know enough about what Eddie’s mother termed “keeping a woman.” It worked, much better than he could have guessed. For the next month he became the perfect husband, the kind she could brag about to her coworkers while unsubtly caressing the stiff lines of her new bag. Myra was fairly easy to please in that field, and he probably could have stuck to Coach with her being none the wiser, but Eddie had always been the covetous sort. Really, it was only a matter of time before he was venturing deeper into the bowels of Saks. 

The salespeople cooing, “What are you looking for, sir?” which, of course, they were getting paid to do, but even he wasn’t dense enough to not be able to recognize the novelty of being put in that position, demanding, deciding, jutting a finger out and saying “That. That is what I want.”

The third year, Myra asked to see the price tag on a Burberry tote and told him off once she did, and that was when Eddie learned that his wife, despite all the ways in which they had meticulously tracked the arc of their lives together, had little in the way of pure, naked ambition. She had already hit her targets, married by 30, two-car garage by 35. (There was the troublesome factor of Eddie’s low sperm count, though both of them, it seemed, were secretly happy about that.)

And yet Myra let him take charge of the money, saying she hadn’t the head for it. So Eddie spent years squirreling his bonuses away via cufflinks and waistcoats that he never wore, the way his bosses bought paintings and yachts. Fashion, he learned and then rationalized, was a commodity sport. He bought three or four pieces a season, leather and gold and Merino wool, and he justified it as investment. The good stuff appreciated, so he let himself appreciate it in turn.

He went to his first runway show in 2008, two months before he was laid off. He never had told Myra about losing his job, those six months of the crash that he’d been unemployed. He just drove into the city like always, parked at the Greenwich Street garage with his annual pass, strolled northwest through Village boutiques and Chelsea galleries. He found that there was a kind of possessive, inhabited thrill in walking up Fifth and having _opinions_. He flipped through issues of GQ at the Borders on Park Ave and circled mannequins on Madison, and it made him feel like he really belonged there, understood what it meant to be a capital-letter New Yorker, wasn’t just some backwoods white trash from whatever podunk little New England town he’d grown up in. He didn’t want to think about that, and why would he? When he had New York pulsing heavy at his fingertips. The city, groaning in the weight of all of its glittering capital, asking him to split open the fruits of his labor, to lay their jeweled insides, the sticky-sweet nectar of money and status, sacrificial at its feet. He was glad enough to oblige. To prove to someone that he had done something right.

*

The day that Eddie told the Losers he was filing for divorce, Richie called him twice.

“Did you, uh, hear? At the hospital? What I said to you the first time you woke up,” he said, voice streaming out of the Bluetooth speakers in Eddie’s car. 

“No, I didn’t. What was it? Was it important?” he’d responded.

“It’s been driving me crazy. If you just wanted to be polite about it, or, I don’t know,” Richie said, crackling and trailing off, as Eddie replied, “What?” distracted, flipping his turn signal and rocking tight onto a ramp.

Richie just repeated, “I don’t know” and then he said, “I have to go,” so fast and mealy-mouthed that Eddie didn’t register it until after the air in the car had gone back to flat and sterile, just the hum of the engine and the whooshing soundtrack of the highway, leaking in through the just-cracked window. Richie never hung up first, Eddie realized then, feeling caught out and off guard at the sudden letting of his nasally voice.

The second call came twelve hours later, at 11:26 PM, a timestamp Eddie could conjure from memory because he frequently revisited the call log and stared at it, absent any other record of what was, in effect, the second-most dramatically consequential phone call of his life.

“Eddie, it is important,” he said, breathless, when Eddie picked up, sitting up alone on the bed in the hotel. He was wearing the pajamas Myra had gotten him for Christmas years ago. He’d thought about leaving them at the house when he packed, but quickly realized that Myra had bought most of his casual clothes and that if he wanted to retain any ability to look like a man who’d blown up his staid, stable life for rational reasons that did not include a nightmare murder clown, he’d have to assume at least some evidence of their life together. He was always going to be branded with it. It was about how he chose to wear it — with anger, or shame, or acceptance.

“It’s really important,” Richie was saying. “It’s basically, holy shit, one of the most important things in my life.” He was pacing back and forth, standing outside for some reason, his face lit almost too brightly by the LED fixtures attached to the wall of the back patio. It was like looking into an interrogation room, Richie washed out and bug-eyed, and Eddie, with only a reading lamp on in his darkened hotel room, sitting rigidly behind the two-way mirror.

“I feel like — I wish I didn’t have to do this over the phone,” Richie said. He wove his fingers into his curls and scrubbed at the back of his scalp. A mosquito hovered into frame near the left side of his forehead. It seemed to think better of landing on his face. Eddie, rather than make eye contact, watched as it flit away. “But I need you to know _now_. I keep thinking about, if you’d died and you didn’t know, and I think - I think that’s _worse_. That’s how bad it is.” 

“I’d rather you hate me, or be creeped out forever, than to not know how much. _How much_. _How long._ God, Eddie. My entire life, I think. My entire life. Of course it’s important.” Richie squeezed his eyes shut in a steeling wince, all the fine new lines on his face scrunching up and converging towards the bridge of his nose.

It was profoundly unfair that Eddie hadn’t gotten to witness them form. Richie at sixteen, acne-prone and perpetually pale as a ghost, to Richie at forty-one, with wrinkles and stubble and what was maybe the start of an age spot under his left eye. Just two data points, and a long, stretched-out line of regression between them. 

Crow’s feet from laughing at other people’s jokes. Worry lines between his brows when they didn’t laugh at his. The deep grooves that ran down half his cheeks to the ridge of his jaw had to be from the bruxism he’d had since they were kids. Richie’s dad had fitted him with a mouth guard to stop him from grinding his teeth together at night, but Richie rarely attempted to wear it. He just left it haphazardly on his nightstand, next to his Walkman and chewed-up pieces of gum rolled back into their silver wrappers. Eddie remembered staring at it at sleepovers in disgust, because he knew Richie sometimes listened to the Walkman on the toilet and did you know that bacteria basically have legs and can move on their own? 

He remembered too, that, on at least three or four occasions, he had stared at the mouth guard for so long that he’d begun to wonder if it would fit in his own mouth, whether the curving edges of his incisors (“a perfect specimen!” Richie would bluster in his Went Voice, clamping one hand around Eddie’s chin to pull his mouth open and giving him a noogie with the other) would slot into the chasmous recesses where Richie’s overbite was supposed to go. He’d never tried to find out, but he’d wondered.

“Eddie,” Richie breathed, soft, careful, cautious, “You know I can never keep my fucking mouth shut.”

The uncanny sensation of knowing what it was that he was going to say ran right through Eddie, like he was being strung up and hung by the wound in his chest. Maybe that was preferable to what was going to happen next. Being shish-kebabed by a Lovecraftian reject didn’t usually come with follow-up expectations. It would have been a one-and-done deal, but then of course, Richie had to go and save his life.

“I love you. I really, deeply am in love with you.”

Richie said it all in a rush, as if his attempt at a sip had missed his mouth and now everything he’d wanted to get across was tipping out too fast down the side of the glass. It spilled all over Eddie’s front, so scalding hot that his body nearly read it as cold. 

Richie’s eyes set and focused, pinning Eddie down, looking so uncharacteristically determined that Eddie did not even consider once that it was in any form of a joke. He had seen that look thrice before in recent memory: once, after Richie had killed a man; twice, before they had killed a monster; thrice, the day Eddie woke up at the hospital and Richie, who Eddie realized had been crying for long enough that the skin around his eyes was inflamed and inflated from it, held his hand and said, “You did it, Eds. We did it,” steady as the beat of the heart monitor.

“Richie,” he said, after he could breathe again, “I just left my wife.”

Richie said, “Yeah,” and it was laced through with hope. Eddie wished that he could be the one to give it back to him. He knew that he couldn’t.

The call ended and Eddie went to work. He went to mediation. He bought a new pair of loafers. Authenticated Italian leather. Backless, like some kind of hippie. He kicked them off under his desk and walked to the printer barefoot.

 _Can we talk about it?_ Eddie texted him, eight and a half days later.

It took six hours for Richie to reply. This was considerably unique when it came to Richie response times, which waffled drastically between immediately and two days. Eddie himself only texted during non-work hours, but he did so at regular intervals, at the same rate at which he checked his email. He had never been able to figure out what it was that set off the multi-day silences, which occurred occasionally when Eddie mentioned Myra, but also when he sent Richie photos of the new recipes he was trying and said _man, I wish you were here to taste this_.

“Why?” he asked, right after Richie picked up, even though he’d practiced something completely different in the car. The “why” was blunt and unfair, he felt, cringing even as it hurtled out of his mouth, but he could no sooner stop it than he could pretend to know the answer. It didn’t make sense, the love that Richie had confessed for him, this fervent, enduring, fucking battery-powered blowtorch.

Of course they had all imprinted on each other, having been uniquely party to a deeply traumatic set of encounters with a violent cosmic deity. There was very little chance of _not_ over indexing meaning after going through something like that. But those twenty-seven years had still happened too. They were, all of them, still circling each other, settling once again into the mundane truths of who they were in relation, except now in the grown-up-person suits that had never quite fit at the knees.

How could Richie know him well enough to love him, when Eddie barely even knew himself?

“I’m an asshole. And a hypochondriac. An actual basket case, Richie, and I give you so much shit. That can’t be good for you.”

“It’s good shit. Like, fibrous, fucking Activia based shit,” said Richie, exceedingly serious, even though the metaphor made no sense. “You never let me take the easy way out. I feel like it means you care about what I have to say.”

“And you care about everyone so much, Eddie, I don’t know how you do that, but it makes me feel like I matter. That things matter. That being here, trying, caring about myself the way you want me to, all of that matters.”

 _My whole life_ , he’d said earlier, and Eddie felt woozy, almost sick. A childhood crush that had metastasized, had just been allowed to grow, unabated. Exercise, clean eating, sunscreen, those could all lower your risk factors. It figured that Richie had never been the type to practice any sort of impulse control.

He grit his teeth, biting down on the reflexive contrition shooting through his veins. “Richie, you do matter. Of course I listen to what you say. You’re smart and interesting and a good person. You’re like, my _favorite_ person, man. Obviously I love you. You’re my best friend. That’s what best friends do. I would do anything for Bev, I would do anything for Mike, for Bill, for Stan, for Ben.”

“I know, Eddie,” he said, calmer than he had any right to be. “I know you do. I love you like that, too.”

“So why is it any different then?” Eddie pleaded.

“It’s, I mean, maybe it’s not? It’s just, it feels so big, Eddie,” Richie said. He paused. “It’s okay if you don’t understand it. I just want you to believe it.”

“I’m — it’s just a lot to take in. I never...” Eddie faltered. He’d never thought of it, and Richie, _his_ Richie — not the one walking around on the west coast reciting pussy jokes to college bars and booze cruises, but the one who grabbed his hand when they went down all the rollercoasters on the seventh grade trip to Funtown Splashtown and tried to pitch Chips Ahoy through Eddie’s bedroom window when Sonia made him stay home sick — hadn’t even existed.

“Okay, also, I guess the big difference is,” said Richie, small and delicate, like he was holding it by the scruff of its neck, “Um. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

When Eddie didn’t respond right away, he closed his eyes and muttered, “It’s sexual,” in that one rare tone of embarrassment. He cracked an eye open, already wincing.

Eddie glanced at the rectangle in the corner of the screen. All he saw was his stretched-out bulldog excuse for a face staring slack-jawed back. Evidently Richie found it sufficiently non-threatening, because he opened both of his eyes then and said, louder this time, “Yeah. So I think you’re hot.”

“Oh. I - I don’t,” Eddie said. He ended it like a sentence, but he didn’t know if it was supposed to be one. 

“I know you don’t,” Richie replied anyway, “Sorry. I told you I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“No, you didn’t. It’s just. I hadn’t ever thought of that. Either.”

Richie sighed. He said, “Listen. I’m not a masochist, alright? Do I want you to want me back? Yeah. But this isn’t my first straight boy rodeo. It’s okay, Eddie, I’ll be okay. Just getting to tell you, that feels good. If that’s all I get, I’ll be okay with it.” He took off his glasses and rubbed a knuckle along the bottom of his right eye. 

“Maybe it’s selfish, but. I like knowing that you know how much you mean to me. I like knowing that you’re here to know that,” he said. The words creeping up the knotted scar on Eddie’s chest. _Richie saved my life_ , he thought, _and_ _I saved his_.

“I can’t give you a lot, okay? I can’t give you the twenty-seven years back, I can’t stop Sonia from hurting you, or Myra, for that matter. But if you’ll let me, I can give you this. It’s yours.”

*

Bev sent Eddie a pair of Tom Ford tie clips, two slim single-breasted Prada blazers, a linen Lemaire jacket, and a bright pink Kenzo t-shirt. Eddie checked online and saw that the tie clips were retailing for $1500. Bev just shrugged and said she’d gotten them free in a swag bag.

“Kenzo? I thought you read my blog,” Eddie said to her when he called.

“Yeah, and I think you should experiment,” she said, “Fashion is for fun!”

Richie’s new stylist was a twenty-six-year-old named Turtle. Eddie knew this because he had texted Bev furiously when the first pap pics came out of Richie in a three-quarter sleeve blazer patterned all over with lobster appliqué, of all things. It was both extraordinarily inane and supremely obnoxious and Richie had probably spilled whatever venti frappucino he was holding in the picture all over it.

Bev typed back _LOL_ and sent back a contact card for someone named “Turtle Maldonado.” The contact photo had green hair and at least three different nose piercings. Eddie looked the name up on LinkedIn and found a profile of someone who had left a position as a textile designer at Rogan + Marsh a year prior to work as a celebrity stylist in LA.

He texted the number, _Do you work for richie tozier_

 _omg is this eddie? hi eddie!!_ the number sent back. _i read ur blog! ur way too mean to cavalli but ur just-right mean to hedi slimane_

By week three, he and Turtle were getting along perfectly fine, actually. 

_Is he wearing joggers???_ Eddie sent. 

_ill have u know he wanted to go w the crotchless 2015 line so u shd be appreciating this_ , Turtle wrote back.

 _You have to stop dressing him in this shit he’s not a 32 year old gallery owner_ , Eddie replied, because Turtle was always taunting him by putting Richie’s middle-aged human Tigger body into whatever streetwear bullshit the kids were creaming themselves over at Central Saint Martins.

_we just wanted ur attention! u didnt say anything about the red duster last wk : < _

Richie had looked like Jack Sparrow in the wine-red iridescent satin, one lapel upturned and his phone sticking precariously out of the breast pocket. It had gotten him, somehow, into the back pages of the National Examiner: “HOMO? OR HOMEWRECKER? Newly ‘out’ comedian Richie Tozier’s post-closet roommate revealed...and it’s a woman?” with a series of surprisingly high-quality shots of Richie arguing with Bev — Eddie knew it was because they refused to agree on what day the recycling should be set out — at the end of his driveway. The photos had instigated a lot of infighting in the comments of blind item message boards, which had had a lot of terrible, bullshit things to say about Richie for months. Eddie read them in bed on his phone in the mornings, because he found rage to be a useful alarm clock. 

Anyways, the coat was beautiful, falling over him like drapery, the sort of fabric that photographed so well that Eddie itched to smooth his fingers over it. Turtle had kept him in a dark brown t-shirt emblazoned with “Boner Killer” in jagged pink font on it that had to be one of Richie’s own. And there were paisley print gradient trousers that went down his long, sprouty legs, stoppered only by a pair of sandstone-beige sneakers. 

The splash page on turtle-maldonado-stylist.com said “I don’t believe personal style is about designers or trends. I do believe that style is about finding what makes you feel good in your body. I want to make you feel good about _who_ you are and _what_ you’re wearing.” It was a nice sentiment, and Richie did look comfortable in the new outfits. The satin coat’s sleeves rolled casually up his forearm, like he wanted to feel the sleek slide of the material closer against his skin. There was one shot where he’d been standing on the street while Bev was still on the sidewalk, Richie with one shoe propped up on the curb. The pants looked to be silk and cut moderately wide, so they floated up and to the side as he extended the sole of his foot, revealing a generous slice of ankle in the space between. Eddie felt the urge to kick the foot back down, to squeeze the protruding ankle bone, to saw the whole thing off and just be done with it. 

It wasn’t like looking at the models on catwalks or in full spread glossy ads, where he’d learned over the years to catalog that kind of detail: how the cut of a suit vent framed the small of a man’s back, where the stitching on a button-up had gone sloppy and haywire. Richie wasn’t polished or done-up like that, the way models were sculpted and preternaturally attractive. He still had shit posture and the slightly awkward bearing of someone who was taller than he’d expected to be.

He was just a guy wearing clothes, clothes that he seemed to like. Which. Good for him! Richie deserved to like things! That was good!

Obviously Eddie would be happy when his friend — his _best friend_ — was happy. Obviously he wanted to see that. If looking at it too long made his gut churn and his palms sweat, well. That was probably indigestion.

*

He called Stan about it.

“You love your wife, right?” Eddie asked him, while trying to dislodge the plastic scoop on the bin of rolled oats in the Whole Foods bulk aisle.

“Yeah,” said Stan, drawn out and suspicious.

For some reason, the universe had given them both a second chance at living. Like, whoops, that supernatural death didn’t count. Stan spent a lot of time trying to rationalize this with Eddie, who really did not have much to contribute. He figured it was best not to look it directly in the eye, lest the universe realized its accounting error and tried to take them back out. 

Out of non-famous and post-recovery Loser solidarity, though, he let Stan ramble on about shared psychosis and quantum entanglement and made sure to say “hm” and “good point” at appropriate intervals. One positive consequence of all that effort was that he and Stan, who as children had operated at often incompatible frequencies, were of late close enough to parlay comfortably from their parallel wavelengths.

“Okay, and how do you know you love her?”

“Eddie. We had this conversation already, right?” Stan sighed, “Tell me you left Myra already. Tell me they haven’t added a _Groundhog Day_ subplot to the _Poltergeist_ remake I already had to live through.”

“Shut up,” Eddie growled. “Your life would never be that interesting.”

Stan sighed again, the sound of his breath crackling into Eddie’s Bluetooth earpiece. “So why are we rehashing a phone call I got four months ago?”

“The context is different!”

“And what’s that, Eddie?”

“It’s,” Eddie managed to get out, and then stopped. He groaned. This was stupid. He was stupid. Richie’s clothes were stupid. Stan was stupid and also a bitch. “Okay, you already told me she’s the light of your life, the air you breathe, all that other bullshit.”

“You’re mixing me up with Ben,” Stan pointed out. Eddie ignored him.

“She completes you, she’s your life partner, she raises you up so you can stand on mountains,” he kept going, waving his arm back and forth exorbitantly. “But. You’re interested in her for other reasons, too, right?”

“Eddie, I am begging you to get to the fucking point.”

“I’m trying to put this delicately!” he yelled, throwing his free hand down in frustration. The other one was squeezing the lentil scoop hard enough to warp the plastic. If he’d had both hands available, he’d wring them together. If he’d had Stan available, he’d wring Stan. 

Finally he gave up and just said it, in one quickening hiss. “You want to fuck her, yeah?” 

There was a long silence. Eddie plunged the scoop into the bin of lentils. That was good. He was going to need lentils when he changed his name and moved to Manitoba to live alone in a cabin where Stan would never be able to find him.

“Yeah, Eddie, I want to fuck my wife.”

“Okay! Cool! God, was that so -” Eddie caught himself instinctively, which was another sign he was still talking to Richie more than was prudent, “difficult?”

“Ask yourself that question. Dick,” Stan said caustically. “Speaking of -”

Eddie cut him off, sputtering. “Don’t - that’s not what I -”

“You make me so angry, sometimes, I swear. I’m going to go over there and squeeze your little blood pressure cuff so hard it’s going to burst.”

“I’m not even wearing it right now,” Eddie lied, because of course he was. He always stopped at Whole Foods on Thursdays, since it was right next to his gym, and so he was still wearing his $500 smartwatch here, circled around the wrist he had braced against the almonds.

Later, Stan texted him a series of long paragraphs about some sort of bird couple that worked together to build their nests, which was apparently special and exciting for bird nerds. _I always knew I wanted to build something with her. A home, a life, a family_ , went one line, which was really a trip, Eddie thought, how much Stan acted like he was too reasonable to be a poetic sap.

Eddie sent him three eye-roll emojis and _Ok cool story walt whitmer_. He got back five middle fingers and _You didn’t have to try to name a poet to prove to me you watch Breaking Bad_.

For the rest of the week, he responded to all of Eddie’s messages in the group chat with _Sorry, Eddie, I’m busy fucking my wife_ and only stopped because Richie always followed that up with the word _BASED_ and this one stupid meme image of Borat.

*

“It’s men in general, right?” Eddie asked. He was blushing furiously. He could feel it steaming up the sides of his cheeks, cresting up over his brow. “Like, you’re not just gay for me, or whatever.”

Richie laughed.

“No, Eds. It’s not just you. Okay, I’m _especially_ gay for you, but, yeah, I’m gay for other people too.” He shoved his tongue into the side of his cheek and Eddie wrinkled his nose in response. “Gross, Richie,” he said, without any bite.

“Don’t worry, I can still get it up for someone else,” Richie continued, waggling his brow. Eddie recognized, with fledgling terror, the flare of jealousy that suddenly curled up his spine. Was it for Richie, who’d had and could have, a lifetime of sex — sex that he desired? Eddie wasn’t sure he knew how to desire people like that. It seemed dangerously louche, to look at someone and know that you wanted to feel them, skin to skin. With Myra, it had been a choice, which was why he had supposed it was real. Sonia had chided endlessly over men, and women, who were driven by wild, dirty lust. Eddie thought, oh, how lucky he’d been to be born without that vice. He didn’t look at other women. He didn’t wander. All of the guys at work hated their wives, and cheated on them. Eddie had thought he was doing okay, since he was only one for two.

Richie said, softer this time, “It’s okay, really, Eddie. Don’t - you shouldn’t feel bad.” He pressed his glasses in by the top of the left frame, a nervous tic that lingered from childhood, after he lost a good chunk of his baby fat and that big coke-bottle pair began to droop down the porcelain slope of his cheeks. “I talked to Bill about this the other day, actually. How you can hold onto love for more than one person. And that the _way_ you love someone can change, even if the fact that you love them doesn’t.”

“He was talking about Bev, I guess,” Richie said, cracking a smile, “I bet he’s still a little hurt. No idea how that guy’s a serious writer. He’s always saying Hallmark-level shit.”

“The heart is a muscle, Richie,” he said in his Bill Voice. “Coming from a dude with two WGA awards. White men failing up, if you ask me. Anyways, I think it means, I’ll always love you, Eddie,” he smiled at that, as if he couldn’t help it, “But hopefully, one day I won’t be _in_ love with you. And you won’t have to deal with all my feelings hanging over your head anymore.”

Eddie thought about it. Richie with a boyfriend. A not-Eddie boyfriend, whom he’d love in a way that would change the way he felt now about Eddie. Well. Richie had known _his whole life_ , he’d said, about those feelings. And Eddie was just finding out, only for Richie to stop having them? It seemed unfair, and then it seemed unfair that he thought it was unfair.

“I like dealing with your feelings, though,” he said. It was getting easier, at least, when Richie talked like that, vulnerable and open, for Eddie to hold out a vein in return.

“Aw, gawrsh,” Richie said. He put a hand on his chest and fluttered his eyelashes. “When you say it like that, Eds, you make it hard for a boy not to fall in love.”

*

Bev was making plans to reconstitute her own label out of the ashes of the last one, and she kept bugging Eddie to join her as CFO.

Eddie complained that it was nepotism, to which Bev said, “Seriously? Mr. Too Big To Fail himself wants to take a stand against nepotism?”

“I don’t know shit about supply-chain management,” he growled, not for the first time.

“Okay, so you can learn on the job then!”

The call had started as an unofficial Divorce Debrief, which happened biweekly between Bev and Eddie and consisted of going back and forth about lawyers’ fees (“Can you believe it?” “I can’t fucking believe it!” “I know, I can’t believe it either!”) and idle speculation as to the state of Bill’s marriage.

“How’s Ben?” Eddie asked, to get them back on topic. Ben had flown out to LA that week, ostensibly to meet with a client. He was staying at Bill’s and taking Bev out for “lunch dates,” she had called them. 

“You know, it scared me, a lot,” she mused, “It still scares me. I got back to Derry and I suddenly remember my whole childhood that I barely knew I forgot, plus this guy is there saying he’s been waiting his whole life for me?” She huffed out a dry, pithy laugh. "I mean, how did he know? He didn’t remember me either. I’m a real person. I can’t just be someone’s adolescent fantasy.”

“But at the quarry -” Eddie began.

Bev shook her head. “Derry was like a fever dream. I was attracted to him and that was all I really needed to know. But after, well. I was still married, I have a life. I’m not the person I was when I was fifteen. If that’s the person he wants, or the person who wants him? That’s not good for either of us.”

“He wants to know who you are now, though,” Eddie said. “The other day, he said to me, did you know Bev’s favorite flowers are morning glories?” He tried to affect Ben’s wide-eyed smittenness there, but it mostly turned out high-pitched and probably offensive. “Because she had a neighbor once who always said rude shit about her not having kids, so she dropped morning glory seeds into her garden and they completely took over it. Isn’t that so smart?”

Bev rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. “Yeah, okay, I know,” She pressed her lips together, the gloss on them sticking bottom to top with an audible smack, “It just takes time, y’know? We have to work on it.”

Eddie grimaced. “Uh-huh.”

Bev squinted at him. “This isn’t me secretly talking about you and Richie, by the way.” Eddie imagined her flicking him on the forehead. “This is an episode of ‘How Bev Got Her Groove Back,’ not ‘Richie and Eddie’s Infinite Bitchfest.’”

He didn’t really have the capacity to deny it anymore, so he said just let out an “I know,” on a resigned sort-of exhale.

Bev chuckled. “Chin-up, kid. It’ll be your turn again next time,” she said. "Although I do want to know what you thought of the suspenders last week. I think there’s something there that would work well for spring.”

*

In June, Richie wore a floral shorts suit to some GLAAD benefit he went to with Bill. So, fuck Turtle for saying they didn’t care about trends and then turning around and putting him in the shorts suit trend that just wouldn’t die. Of course, it had to be Dries Van Noten, so then Eddie was lusting over the ruched waistline of the shorts and that made him think about Richie’s dick, which had to be right there, too. If he zoomed in a little into the photo Bill had sent of the two of them standing on either side of Neil Patrick Harris, he could see what was either the outline of it, or a particularly large wrinkle.

Eddie got half-hard trying to decide between the two options, and then concluded it was equally embarrassing either way. Unfortunately, he’d already passed the event horizon of being turned on, so he zoomed back out, enough that Bill was still not visible, but that all of Richie was, plus maybe, like, the left side of NPH. He jerked off looking at Richie’s knobbly fucking legs, which were way too thin for the rest his body, and yet Eddie still had a vision of them sliding over his own when he came.

It was becoming a problem, all the jerking off and thinking about Richie.

Not ethically, because he figured Richie’s continuing series of love confessions — seriously, they were still coming at a steady clip, all “God, I love you Eds,” and “You’re fucking amazing,” and “I wanna, like, bite your head off,” whenever Eddie told him about mundane shit like being the only competent person on the Stevens account, or who he thought was going to get eliminated from _The Voice_ that week — plus Richie’s entire personality, act or not, was enough condemnable evidence against the relative cleanliness of Richie’s own hands.

Not psychosexually, either, because Eddie thought it was pretty clear by now that Richie had, if not awakened, at least recently inspired, Eddie’s sexual attraction to other men, namely Richie himself. In a large sense, it was a relief for Eddie, who’d spent decades operating with his sex drive on mute. He’d gone to at least two doctors about it, who told him no, his symptoms were not congruent with erectile dysfunction, although here, would he consider calling their colleagues over at their partner clinic? Eddie said “uh-huh” and took the cards with "LCSW" and "LMHC" typeset on them in neat block print, and left them crushed up at the bottom of his glove box. So maybe he could have figured it out earlier, but maybe that had been the clown too, and regardless, he was here now, sexually attracted to men (yes, he’d tried it watching porn) and sexually attracted to Richie (yes, he’d tried it watching Richie’s stand-up) in particular.

It had always been like that, after all. Eddie said “no way” and he went into the sewers anyway. Ranting and craven but too curious for his own good. Maybe it took him a minute, but he still got there, in the end.

Really, the problem was physiological. It wasn’t healthy for a middle-aged man to masturbate this much. A month in, he started worrying that it was going to cause chafing to his erectile tissue. He spent two hours in the middle of his work day researching hypoallergenic lube. He was getting irritable when he couldn’t make time for it; he was thinking about it nearly all the time: at work, at the gym, when Richie texted him, when Richie didn’t text him.

 _Zegna? In August? Are you trying to give him heatstroke?_ Eddie sent, with a link to a set of red carpet shots of Richie wearing three layers of suede and a pair of sheepskin gloves at the premiere of _The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature_.

Turtle replied with a video of some British guy rapping and captioned it _man’s not hot!!!_

Eddie scrolled back up, looked closely at the creases where Richie’s joints bent in the gloves, and circled his hand around his own cock.

In the group chat, Richie and Bev said they were going to buy an Easy-Bake Oven to make edibles. Later that week, Richie wore a DSquared2 leather jacket with tassels on it to Target and got papped carrying the box out to the parking lot. Eddie hated DSquared2 but he came all over his chest just looking at it, the way the jacket bunched up around Richie’s shoulders, the collar framing the lean incline of his neck, remembering Richie’s leather jacket in Derry, the rubbery pleather reflecting the glare of the overhead lighting as Eddie pushed their forearms closer together. _Let’s arm wrestle, let’s touch, let’s kiss!_

Eddie had been vibrating out of his skin and bones with anxiety, and then had parts of that skin and bone eviscerated by the demonic expression of that anxiety, and throughout all of that, Richie had been in love with him.

That was insane. Obviously everything about Derry was insane. But that was especially insane.

*

“Did you always like them? Men, I mean,” Eddie asked, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth.

“Well. It’s probably a lot more complicated than that. Turtle is always schooling me on gender expression versus gender identity versus sexual identity, et cetera, et cetera,” Richie said fondly. “The other day they sent me this diagram of a gingerbread person and then this long text about how the diagram kind of sucks and sexuality is really just a social function and biology is fake since we’re all just amorphous beams of light at the end of the day,” he said, bobbing his head indulgently. “I can send you this journal article about it. It was actually pretty interesting.”

“I’m not here to get a degree in gender studies, assnut,” Eddie snapped. “I just want to know how you knew you were gay.”

“As soon as I knew I wanted nut in my ass,” said Richie, not missing a beat, and Eddie nearly threw his phone at even the outline of that image, let alone the thought of coloring it in. _There’s your answer, moron_ , said the Stan voice in his head, which had no eyes but always seemed to be rolling them anyways.

“Are you fishing for compliments, Eddie?” Richie said. He didn’t look angry yet, but Eddie could see the set of his mouth start to flatten. “It was you,” he said, staring at Eddie resolutely, as if daring him to question it, to hide from it.

Eddie looked back. It was only fair. It was true that he’d just wanted to hear it.

Richie glanced away first. He pushed his gaze off to the side of the camera and added, “Henry Bowers’s cousin, one summer. Brad Pitt in that Levi’s commercial. And, I don’t know, I probably thought Stan’s dad was hot. But mostly you.”

He shook his head in a quick jerking motion, hair flopping out to the sides. The way he used to shake out dandruff onto Eddie’s turkey sandwiches at lunch, sniggering something something about seasoning (“Salt an’ pepper, Eds! Let’s talk about sex, bay-bee!”). “Hey, do you think I still have a shot with Connor Bowers? You know, now that I’ve committed cousincide.”

Eddie opened his mouth, reflexively prepared with a _fat chance, Trashmouth_. He closed it.

“You’re sure this isn’t weird for you?” Richie asked. He was looking back at the camera again. Eddie could see the muscle tense where he was clenching down on his jaw. It looked like it could cut glass, he thought to himself, because that was the kind of thought he was having regularly now.

Eddie shook his head determinedly. “You shouldn’t have to hide yourself, Rich. That’s the whole point.”

The jaw muscle relaxed. “It’s nice to talk about it,” Richie murmured, assessing, “I think it helps, not bottling it up.”

Eddie nodded. He tried to smile back.

“You look cute like that,” Richie said, smiling goofily. “I always thought so, when we were kids. Whenever you worried and fussed over me. You still get that same little wrinkle between your eyebrows, right there.” He poked a finger towards the top of the screen.

Eddie reached up between his brows to try to feel it for himself.

 _why’d you ask me that?_ Richie texted him, later that night.

Eddie stared at it. He wrote back _I don’t know. I need some time_ before he could chicken out or start looking through those Zillow listings in Manitoba. 

_okay_ , Richie sent, _of course you can have it_.

*

In November, Richie came to New York.

He had an interview on Jimmy Fallon the Friday before Thanksgiving, and Eddie offered to let him stay at his place, this one-bedroom he was renting in the UWS.

Richie got in on Thursday, late at night. He took a cab to the apartment, even though Eddie had put his ringer on high and told Richie to just wake him up. It was just as useless of a noble gesture as Eddie had told him it would be, because the buzzer in Eddie’s building was down for maintenance, so Richie had to call him anyway just to be let in. 

They shuffled around each other in Eddie’s tiny living room while he pointed out the bathroom and the linen closet, both of them too aware that they hadn’t existed together in the same space since New Year’s in Atlanta, when Eddie and Myra had been freshly separated but still married, and Eddie had only gotten to talk to Richie alone once, before Stan had swooped in and asked Richie to help him relight the fire.

It hit Eddie like a cresting shockwave now, the solid, tangible form of Richie there in his home. He’d been worried occasionally that he’d invented it all whole-cloth, the kind of digital fixation that was rotting kids’ brains. But here was a person who had parts and weight and blood pumping through his veins, whom he’d known and not known and then known again. Here was a person for whom Eddie felt a free-range blue-sky longing, to see and be seen by, to lie on his back with, holding hands, like a pair of baby sea otters floating together on the open sea.

It was fucking criminal, what this shit did to you. The Ben Hanscom Yearning Club inducting another member into its sad, pathetic ranks.

Richie went to sleep on the couch and Eddie thought about what it would be like if he hadn’t, until his brain hit a wall, and he fell asleep with his body curved guiltily around his TempurPedic pillow.

Eddie took Friday off and they went to Bryant Park. Richie bought him a Belgian waffle and watched him lick the chocolate sauce off of his fingers. He made them stand in line for ice skating and then laughed when Eddie immediately fell on his ass. He wore a pair of obnoxious celebrity sunglasses, a ratty gray beanie, rattier thrift store jeans, the type of black puffer that people in LA owned for when they got invited to go skiing or had to film something in New York, and the blue-and-tan Missoni sweater Bev had given him. Eddie put his hand up against it and said, “Oh, it really is soft,” just to see Richie’s cheeks redden in real life.

In the afternoon, Eddie drove them over to 30 Rock and wandered around the Rockefeller Christmas tree while Richie did his pre-show interview. At 3pm he got let in again and made a big enough fuss to the security guard that they called Richie out, and then Richie made a big enough fuss that Eddie got let backstage.

“Hey,” Eddie said, smiling, when the dressing room door shut.

“Hey,” said Richie. He put his hand up in an aborted attempt at a wave until he seemed to register that Eddie was no more than six feet away from him and had only recently been hanging on to his elbow while they ice skated amongst a sea of red-nosed holiday-card couples.

He had two-thirds of a new suit on, the one that Turtle had sent Eddie creep shots of when they’d gotten it tailored. A deep purple jacket with a notch lapel and a crisp white shirt with a spread collar and a pleated placket. Matching dress pants with a built in cuff. It was the closest to a conservative choice out of anything Richie had worn in the past few months, because that was how they played it on shows like these, all the men dressed in mind-numbing navy and gray. It nearly reminded Eddie of the Brooks Brothers suits who poured out of his building at lunchtime, hunting down Sweetgreen in their Cole Haan wingtips. The thought made him shiver. Richie wasn’t supposed to end up like that, all sanded-down and running sheeplike at the edges.

“Can you, um. Would you help me tie my tie?” Richie said.

He unrolled it from where it had been sitting coiled up on the table. It was lavender tweed, and Eddie heard himself let out an audible sigh of relief. “I saw it at the tailor’s,” he said, absent-mindedly looping it around his wrists, “I thought it looked nice, and I remembered, or well, I thought I remembered, you liked purple.”

“I do,” said Eddie, stepping closer, “It’s really beautiful, Richie. You have a good eye.” He reached forward to draw up an end of the tie. He placed a hand on top of it, right over the spot where it circled Richie’s palm.

“May I?” Eddie asked.

“Yeah,” Richie breathed back.

Eddie unwound the tie from Richie’s wrists and reached up to sling it over the back of his neck. He stepped closer, tugging at the ends. This close, he could feel Richie’s body heat coming off of him in waves. He could smell the bergamot notes of his cologne. He felt the crown of his head heat up and the beginnings of something like heartburn at the end point of his esophagus.

Eddie crossed the tie over itself at the second button. He had to rest a hand against Richie’s chest to do so, feeling the solidity of it right in the catch of his fingertips. He lifted one side of the heathered cloth an inch higher so that the tie was tense against Richie’s neck and deftly looped the other end over, under, through. He pinched the triangular knot into a neat, tapered point and held onto it as he pulled the tail down, smoothing over the knot in a poor simulacrum of a caress. He had to stop himself from using his palms to iron out the nascent wrinkles on Richie’s shirt.

On an impulse, he ran a hand through Richie’s slicked-back hair, fluffing it up and trying to unstick some of the strands. Richie let out a strangled vocalization from the back of his throat. Eddie tried not to linger on it. “There,” he said, patting some of the flyaways back down when he was done, “That’s better.” He backed up, at last, but too quickly, so that he nearly tripped on the leg of the folding chair behind him.

“Oh,” said Richie, who was very studiously looking at a point above Eddie’s head. His Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed. “Thank you.”

*

They got back late. Eddie threw his keys on the hook by the door and toed off his loafers. “Hang on,” he called out to Richie over his shoulder. His body vibrated as he slipped into the bedroom. “Want to get changed and watch the Bachelor with me?” he asked through the door.

He was stripping down to his boxers, feeling so eager and desperate for it that he barely noticed when Richie didn’t respond. When he came back out, Richie was still standing uncomfortably by the door. His eyes bugged out when he saw Eddie appear in just his dark boxers and an old t-shirt from a corporate retreat that was two sizes too big. It read “Elliott Management for Equality” in rainbow letters on the front.

“Richie?” Eddie asked again, staring at Richie over the kitchen counter.

“Oh. I thought you liked this, though?” Richie said. He was looking down and thumbing at one of the buttons on his jacket.

Eddie said, “I do. But I like most things you wear,” soft and tentative. He padded over to the kitchen counter, socked feet tapping over the wood laminate. 

“I told you I was figuring it out, you know? You remember?” He waited for an answer. Richie swallowed and nodded.

“I really have, I’ve been trying. I feel like there was this block for the longest time and I know it hurt you, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I don’t want to hurt you, even though sometimes I do. I just, I needed time.” Eddie took a deep breath, “Thank you for giving it to me.” He braced his arms against the back of one of the high-top chairs. “I kept looking and looking and what I figured out is, I like it. I like how you look in suits and I like how you look in sweats, and I even fucking liked how you looked in those lobster pants. You had this stray piece of hair flying out in the photos and I wanted to smooth it down just for an excuse to touch your face. And then I was wondering which pant leg you tucked your dick into, which was really dubiously heterosexual.”

“So. There it is. I think about you all the time. It’s like a fucking disease. I wake up and I’m like, what is Richie going to have for breakfast? Then I go to work and I’m all, did Richie even have breakfast? And when I come home, it makes me so goddamn happy to hear your fucking incorrect opinions about breakfast. I mean, you know this. I told you this already. I told you I was in bro-love with you, and I’m not saying that’s not possible for other people, you know, I don’t know their lives, but, Richie,” he put his palms flat on the counter and leaned forward to underscore the point, “That’s not what’s happening here. Because, and I’m sorry it took so long for me to understand the other stuff too.”

“I care about you, I want to touch you, I love you. I sorta want to tell you all that, all the time.”

There it was, and there Richie was, and then Richie was right here and he was kissing Eddie on the mouth, his lips dry from the cold, but Eddie had licked his and the moisture of his spit fastened them together, hook to loop.

“Richie, I always,” started Eddie when they broke an inch apart. He opened his eyes and looked into Richie’s glassy ones, up-close, surrounded by all the realness of his physical self: lines, pores, spots, hair. It felt impossible again, that Eddie could have all of this feeling bursting inside of him and not know where to put it, spilling out of his cupped palms when he raised them up and asked Richie to drink. He thought it could fill their lungs until they both choked.

Richie blinked and nodded and kissed him again.

Richie cupping Eddie’s chin between his palms, running his thumbs over and over down the grooves in his cheeks. He brushed one over the underside of Eddie’s bottom lip, tugged it down to open Eddie’s mouth wider, pressed another finger into a tender point where they touched.

Eddie pulled him backwards to the living room, pushing his jacket off his shoulders as he tried to remember how to walk around with his eyes still closed and his body still mid-embrace. He shoved Richie down onto the couch and climbed into his lap, pushing his ass down into Richie’s meaty thigh, Richie with his arms wrapped tight around Eddie’s back. He slid his hands under the shirt and traced the lines of Eddie’s shoulder blades in big, swooping arcs.

Eddie levered forward onto his knees, caging Richie’s thick waist between his thighs. He jammed a hand into the vanishing gap between their chests and rucked Richie’s undershirt high up towards his chest, his forearm measuring the rise and fall of Richie’s jagged breath over the fleshy drum of his stomach. He tilted forward again until his dick lined up against the give of it. Eddie was leaking through the thin cotton of his boxers. He rubbed himself experimentally into Richie’s torso and Richie groaned.

He pulled his head back and to the side and wheezed out, “Eddie, Eddie, it’s so much, I-” He had his eyes squeezed shut and his hands squeezing Eddie’s waist as he said it.

There was a thread of spit still connecting their lips. Eddie stared at it and then he crooked a finger up and through it, cutting it like a big ceremonial ribbon. The spit looped over the tip of his finger, shiny and slick. He stuck it into his mouth. Richie groaned again. He put the palm of his big hand on the small of Eddie’s back and Eddie leaned forward, toppling easily into Richie’s chest. He raised his head again to mouth wildly at the patch of stubble under Richie’s bottom lip.

Richie ghosted a finger down his asscrack, still over the material barrier of his boxers, stopping midway through to circle lightly over Eddie’s hole, and then starting again until he reached the back of Eddie’s balls. He put another finger down there and rubbed with increasing pressure. Eddie gasped. He raised his ass higher and unconsciously arched his spine. “Eddie, fuck, you can’t just,” Richie gasped back.

Eddie put the heel of his right hand over the hardened mound of Richie’s crotch and whined. Richie said, “Oh, fuck.” Eddie sat down directly on it, dragging his body back and forth. “Fuck,” said Richie again.

He put a hand into Eddie’s boxers and grasped him at the root, heavy, slick, hot. Eddie thought he could have paper-mâchéd the exact shape of each of those fingers curving around his dick. Richie moved his hand up the shaft and twisted his wrist, and Eddie came, panting, rabbiting his hips forward and sliding his hand reflexively up and down the length of Richie’s tie.

Richie pressed his fingertips into the seam where Eddie’s ass met his thigh and closed his mouth over Eddie’s tongue again. He jerked his hips up twice, bouncing Eddie up with him. When he settled back into Richie’s lap, he could feel the damp spot seeping underneath. It filled him with feral glee, to be sitting there in a lapful of Richie’s come, with his own coating the webs of Richie’s right hand.

“Richie, I’m in love with you,” he said, because he hadn’t yet.

Richie laughed. “Me too, Eds,” he said, “We ruined my suit, though.”

In an hour, they would get up and pat at the stains with a paper towel soaked in water. Eddie would search in vain for his garment brush and not find it. They would shower, separately (Eddie would insist) and change, and get into Eddie’s bed, side by side, facing each other like question marks, the way they used to share as kids.

In the morning, they would wake up with Eddie’s front glued sweatily onto Richie’s back, their legs and feet entwined, Eddie’s wrists going numb where they were tucked in under Richie’s armpits. They’d have sex again. Eddie would bring the suit to the dry cleaners down the block, appropriately shame-faced. Richie, pasting his chest against Eddie’s back and smelling the slope of his neck, would say “There’s no way that’s the worst thing they’ve seen here” into his ear. Eddie would snort and spin them out the door to pick up BECs at the kosher deli. They’d bring them back up to the apartment to eat and make out afterwards. 

In two days, Richie would fly back to LA.

For now, Eddie said, “It’s okay. They’re just clothes.” He locked his hand into Richie’s and pressed a kiss into the center of his beating chest.

**Author's Note:**

> here is a bonus [twitter thread](https://twitter.com/reconvenings/status/1329908847503421446) with image commentary!


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